Posted by Joe P in New Course Supervisor position

Posted by Vice Admiral Daniel Lerner (Commandant) in New Course Supervisor position
The Academy has always had to find the right way to balance its fleet and department duties. At the time when there were three to four ships, it made sense to have additional admin support on the fleet side, with other members of the Academy staff being able to divide their time between the fleet and department responsibilities - this led to the creation of the Assistant Fleet Liaison Officer (AFLO).

We are now down to a single Academy ship. At the same time, there is a growing interest in using current Academy department resources to help with a renewed interest within the club. A re-alignment is needed in how the Academy uses available resources (which in plain English, means where we need available volunteers and experience). I am therefore planning on making two changes this term to the Academy staff organization.

First, I will be officially eliminating the AFLO position (which hasn’t been filled in a couple terms now). I will post a mandate to make this official at the same time that I finalize the mandate for the discussion below.

Second, I want to create a new position dedicated for supervising the courses. I envision this position having the following responsibilities:
1) Overall supervision of the content of all of the courses, and approving content changes
2) Ensuring tutors remain active
3) Making recommendations to the ACmdt for new tutors or replacement tutors
4) Making recommendations to the ACmdt for new courses (or to remove a course)
5) Ensuring standardization of exams and grading for courses at similar levels
6) Preparing graduation certificates, etc. and ensuring the graduation list is updated
7) Marketing and promoting the courses

I envision that the person filling this position would generally not change from term-to-term, and instead, like an Executive Assistant, would be expected to keep the position until they stepped down or the ACmdt felt a replacement was needed. This is to balance against the term-to-term replacement of the ACmdt/VCmdt, and to ensure that a clear understanding of the courses is preserved from term-to-term, and that projects that may take longer than a term (such as a course re-write) can be worked out without risk of a changeover of the people working on that.

What does everyone think about this? Are there proposed responsibilities that should be added or removed? Any concerns about my thoughts that the person keeps the position from term-to-term?

Also taking suggestions for position titles. Currently I have “Head Proctor” but that may be a bit boring.

(I would like to keep this discussion focused on the position rather than the courses themselves. After this position is filled, we will resume an older Command discussion about what the goals, etc. are of the courses.)

Daniel Lerner
Academy Commandant

All of this stuff can be basically summed up as “the Commandant’s job.” Why can’t you do it, exactly?

I don’t really buy this argument of “we need to have someone permanent because of too much change over every term.” It could apply to the entire Academy. Except that’s silly to do, because the whole point of having the Academy be a cabinet position is that we can establish some form of accountability over whether or not people are present and actually doing it. When the club is broken that only happens once every eight months for the cabinet jobs, and never for the non-cabinet jobs.

EDIT: Just to expand on the above, the Academy has a Commandant and a Vice Commandant, and an AFLO if they appoint one, and courses were typically handled by the Commandant, or the Vice Commandant if someone delegated the work to them. The argument you yourself put forward is that we don’t need an AFLO anymore because the Academy overhead is less than it used to be. If there’s less work to do, then we don’t need more people to do it.

Unless your response is that the Commandant and the Vice Commandant have failed to manage courses. I would counter that by saying the President (read: You, at least some of the time) failed to keep the Academy accountable for doing that work and appointed people who were absent and had no interest in doing it. We shouldn’t be inventing more jobs so that people who have been doing nothing can continue to do nothing.

Joe

While I like the idea and, like Jerome, would have great interest in filling it, I am inclined to agree with Joe (at least to some extent). As far as I’m aware, the Academy Commandant doesn’t oversee a lot apart from cadet placement and reinstatement of GMs. Any other responsibilities are few and far between.

However, despite that being a sound argument, I get the feeling it’s been said before, as I’ve heard things about the courses needing a major update for over a year now. Yes, it might technically be part of the Commandants job, but we can say that all day long and it won’t change the fact that the work’s not getting done for some reason or another. Maybe a new position is necessary, even just a temporary one designed for course revision. Alternatively, the Vice Commandant position could be eliminated/transformed into this new Academic Dean-esque role.

Gavin